A Year in Reading: Janet Fitch

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For me the best, most moving, overwhelming novel of the year was Hungarian-American Les Plesko’sNo Stopping Train. Lyrical in style, tough in mood, enigmatic and structured through series of interlocking love triangles, it spans the end of WWII to the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Its publication comes tragically on the heels of Plesko’s death by suicide in 2013.

No Stopping Train propelled me headlong into a series of Eastern works, old and new. Nobelist Imre Kertesz’sLiquidation was the perfect follow-up, a bracing, formally inventive short novel of love and betrayal among the literati in the 1980’s in Hungary, treating many of the issues of Plesko’s book. Then I reread Sergei Dovlatov’sThe Suitcase, a collection of breathtakingly funny and poignant Russian short stories which consider the provenance of eight objects he brought to America in the 1980s — rather the way Primo Levi wrote on the elements in The Periodic Table.

Looking around for something big to plunge into, I found American author Josh Weil’s first novel, The Great Glass Sea, an elegant, lush work set in a slightly alternative-future Russia, about separated twins — one, a “New Russian,” trying to get ahead in the capitalist system; the other, whom you might see as “the Russian soul” just wanting to get back to the land and reunite with his brother — in a land dominated by a corporation using sky-mirrors and enormous glass greenhouses to eliminate the night. Weil is a gorgeous writer on the sentence level, and creates the feel of myth and perfectly captures the texture of Russian thought.

More Russia please. American Ken Kalfus’s short story collection Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies fit the bill. My favorite stories were the title one, concerning a nuclear disaster with Chernobyl overtones, and the last one, “Peredelkino,” in which a member of the official Soviet literati straddles the fence between collaboration and independence, while his wife, the ultimate reader, retreats to their treasured dacha in the writer’s village best known as the home of Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in later years. This and Liquidation spoke to each other in my reader’s consciousness in the most serendipitous, exciting way.

I admit to being the last person in America to read Denis Johnson, but I knew Les Plesko admired him. After the Josh Weil book, I craved another big one, so started with a book you don’t hear much about, Already Dead, a love song to the northern coast of California, and discovered a lush, populous, intricate work I could not stop reading — a suspenseful, landscape-rich, emotionally accurate and often dead funny novel.

Now I was ready for contemporary novels. Three of them brought it home. Dylan Landis’s edgy short novel-in-stories Rainey Royal had me jumping out of my seat. I knew girls like Rainey in school — beautiful, bohemian, seductive yet dangerously unpredictable, your best friend one minute and then, a straight razor slashing you to bits. But who were they from their own point of view? Landis shows us — in tight, brilliantly faceted language — in a 1970’s New York that had resonances with The Flamethrowers.

Nayomi Munaweera’s gemlike novel of the Sri Lankan civil war, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, I would best describe as a “mini-epic.” The short intense novel took me deep into the life of that island nation through its girls on both sides of the conflict, daughters of intertwined families and their histories ties, which are then torn apart by the worst of all possible wars. Everyone’s a casualty in some way, even those who seem to have escaped. Deservedly shortlisted for the Man Asia prize.

Lastly, a book which practically vibrated off my bedside table for the beauty of its language and the intensity of its story was Ruby by Cynthia Bond. A girl returns for New York City to her hometown, the all-black township of Liberty, Texas, only to be undone by the restless spirits of the past. Powerful and hard to shake, it lost nothing by its thematic resonances with Toni Morrison’s haunted Beloved, as well as its streak of humor in the depiction of its small-town yokels, which reminded me of later William Faulkner. I love a book that tears me to shreds — and, on the sentence level, soars to the heavens.

Janet Fitch
is the author of the novels Paint It Black and White Oleander. Her short stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Black Clock, Room of One's Own, and Los Angeles Noir, and she is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. A film version of her novel Paint It Black will be going into production later this year. She is currently finishing a novel set during the Russian Revolution. Fitch regularly blogs at www.janetfitchwrites.wordpress.com.

Lorraine López is an Assistant Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She won the 2003 Independent Publishers Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, awarded by the Jenkins Group, for Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories. The same work also won the 2003 Latino Book Award for Short Stories, awarded by the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. In 2001, López was awarded the Inaugural Miguel Marmol Prize for Fiction, selected by Sandra Cisneros and awarded by Curbstone Press, for a first book-length work of fiction of a Latino/a writer. Her novel The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters was published in October of 2008.Though a fiction writer, this year I found myself reading more memoir than fiction, and when I came across Bich Minh Nguyen'sStealing Buddha's Dinner, I felt as if I'd stumbled across a cache of emeralds. This moving and stunningly well-written chronicle of growing up working class and an immigrant in the midwest connected with me in a profound way. When I finished it, I immediately had my husband read it, so we could keep Nguyen's work alive through discussing it. Another brilliant memoir that I encountered and urged others to read, just in order to have people to discuss it with, is Joy Castro'sThe Truth Book, which I reread this year. Castro's memoir describes growing up as the adopted child of a dysfunctional family of Jehovah's Witnesses, but again, it is the sharp and lucid prose style, the sparkling writing that won me over. Both are books I will read and read again, enjoying them anew in future years.More from A Year in Reading 2008

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older, but the world seems so much messier to me than it once did, and much of the reading I’ve done in the past year has been with the hope of making sense of it, untangling the various strands to learn how and why things are joined, as well as how and why other things are broken.
Two of the books that have helped me, that have delivered the sort of clarity I was craving, are Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson.
I almost didn’t want to say the Coates. I hate being obvious. But the mere fact that Between the World and Me will end up on many people’s best-of lists didn’t seem like a very good reason for leaving it off mine, when in fact it deserves to be there (and everywhere else).
I read the book during a trip out of the country, when I had a blissfully long flight that let me sink into the density of the language and of the ideas. By the time I stepped off the plane, I had dog-eared almost a third of the pages in the book. Is it perfect? No. Is it great? Absolutely. It brilliantly situates the personal within much broader frameworks -- historical, political, human -- and as I read it, I could feel the boundaries of my thinking expand and I could feel my own sense of the world change shape. I know the book has been criticized for its male focus, but for me Coates’s insistence on the physical body sent my mind racing with parallel thoughts about what it is to be a woman in this world, and therefore it pushed the boundaries of my own thinking on that subject, too. Which is to say, the words on the page are one thing, but the magic is in what they do to you as a reader, and Coates’s words did a lot for me.
As for When I Was a Child I Read Books, I will be the first to admit that it was too much for me sometimes. I had to re-read certain sentences more than twice, and still I wasn’t sure that I was grasping everything they had to offer. Which is scary to consider, because even in my failing, they offered so much.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about imagination lately and how it relates to empathy, so I gobbled up lines like this:
I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly...I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.
And in light of the current world order -- or disorder, as it were -- lines like this resonated deeply:
In fact, Europe has gone berserk from time to time over this anxiety about mixed populations...The assumption behind it is that people who differ from oneself are therefore enemies who have either ruined everything or are about to...When this assumption takes hold, the definition of community hardens and contracts and becomes violently exclusive and defensive.
It feels sometimes like the universe gives you exactly what you need at the very time you need it. Both of these books were that for me. A balm for anxious thinking, and an incitement toward more curious inquiry. The tangles of the world will never be undone, no matter how hard we try, but books like these remind me of the beauty that can emerge simply in the effort.
More from A Year in Reading 2015Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

Year in Reading reminds me of that cinematic device where the camera slowly backs away from the characters we’ve been following until it’s looking at them from outside their window, and then back farther still until you see into their neighbors’ windows as well, and farther still to show a whole building of occupied windows, and then a whole city, until you are looking at hundreds of little scenes in hundreds of little windows. And you think, if I contain multitudes, and there are multitudes of people, then there are multitudes upon multitudes, and your brain starts to spin. What I’m trying to say is that over the last few weeks, 78 writers have written about close to 500 books, and following the posts as they roll out is as intimidating and overwhelming one day as it is invigorating the next.
Of those books, nearly half were fiction, the most popular genre by far, followed by biography and memoir, making up roughly 15% of the recommendations. Another 15% was taken up by traditional non-fiction — books I categorized as either “history,” “essays,” or “events.” And our contributors recommended 55 books of poetry during the series, a healthy list for anyone who is definitely, no take-backs, going to read more poetry in 2016.
Surprising no one, Ta-Nehisi’s Coates’sBetween the World and Me and Elena Ferrante’sNeapolitan Quartet were the twin titans of this year’s series, each being cited by 12 of our contributors. Close behind, A Little Life and The Argonauts were each mentioned eight times. What is surprising, and a little delightful, is that two contributors read Colette’sClaudine at School this year, and two more read Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. I’ve added Eileen Myles to my reading list for next year based on that, and because Chelsea Girls wasn’t even her only book to be recommended this year. I’ve also added Joy Harjo’sConflict Resolution for Holy Beings based on Sandra Cisneros’srecommendation, and the line she quoted, and its awesome title. I also added Vivian Gornick, especially The Odd Woman and the City, because Hannah says it’s “about what it feels like to be lonely, and what it feels like to be free. It’s about what it feels like to change your mind, about the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth that comes after you’ve come of age, and even after you’ve ‘come into your own.’”
It’s been a privilege for Lydia and I to edit the series this year. We hope you’ve found a few things you’d like to read, a few writers who share your tastes, and a few who don’t. Year in Reading is like drinking from a firehose of literary wonders. It always helps me start off my new year itching to get into the books I’ll write about at the end of it. See you then.
More from A Year in Reading 2015Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

This was a year of short stories, of picking up a book around midnight, when common sense dictated I should have been asleep, and refusing to set it down until two or three, at which point there was basically no hope of salvaging the following morning. This year was too hectic for grand scopes and labyrinthine plots. If I was lucky, those few evening hours in which I got to read wiped out the detritus of the workday, replacing them with voices and characters that scattered at the sound of my phone's alarm. For a while I've thought that short stories, more so than other forms, are perfectly suited to adult life, if only because they accomodate the low-level amnesia of the stressed. The chronically busy person reads Alice Munro, say, and gets her brief hit of human frailty, which she then takes with her to the post office, or the doctor, or dinners packed with relatives.
I needed dependably good work, in other words, which is why, back in May, I picked up the latest Rivka Galchen book, American Innovations, on the morning it came out. (On Kindle, mind. I haven't camped out for anything since I was young enough to hoard Transformers.) In 2010, just before the end of my post-college underemployment, The New Yorker released its 20 under 40 list, which included several authors I was already a little bit obsessed with. I read through the entire collection in the space of a week, envying the skills on display in the entries by Karen Russell and Wells Tower, among others. But it wasn't until I got to "The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire," Galchen's perfect tale of a pregnant writer whose husband has left her, that I felt too dazed to go through with my schedule of planned errands and tasks. Written in the looping, contradictory sentences of a very smart person in shock, the story is tragic and wry, unveiling the deceptions of the narrator's husband through a series of confessions by her friend. When I was finished, I felt embarrassed that I hadn't heard of this writer, who understood with a rare clarity how the mind tries to reckon with turmoil.
That piece, with slight modifications, appears in American Innovations, as do several other examples of first-class work. A remarkable thing about the collection is how well it captures the messiness at the heart of civilized life. In "The Region of Unlikeness," a woman who befriends two odd, pretentious strangers comes to realize, after hearing one of them detail his eccentric view of space-time, that one or perhaps both of her new friends are painfully, incurably disturbed. In "Wild Berry Blue," a woman meets a gyro shop worker who looks exactly like her dead father, inspiring reflections on "the vast distances between nuclei and electrons." In all the book's stories, the mysteries of science and philosophy, of meticulously organized attempts to find order in a baffling universe, are kin with garden-variety moments of unreality. They incite a sense that bewilderment is the sanest reaction to the world.
Of course, I read other things, too. These included Flying to America, a posthumous collection of characteristically wacked-out Donald Barthelme stories, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which can function as a bible for a certain kind of person. (I am that kind of person.) And I also read more stories by Barry Hannah, the freewheeling, half-drunk uncle I always wish I'd had. But none of these books, great though they were, occupied me in quite the way that American Innovations did. As one of the book's characters puts it, “there’s your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known.”
That island is where I live. That island is where all of us live. Let's not kid ourselves about how far out we can see.
More from A Year in Reading 2014Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.